This will be short, but I am looking for genuine answers from President Obama's most ardent defenders on this website about a little quandary that a persistent argument of their's presents.
The following is the gist of the defenders' argument:
Step 1: "You fauxgressive critics of President Obama are a joke, a laughably, infinitesimally small proportion of the Democratic Party's base, a faction that is infested with Hillary Clinton dead-enders, Redstate trolls, or hard leftists who don't live in reality and are rightfully ignored by everybody. You have no power whatsoever and are just whiners pissing in the wind. LOL @ you, losers!"
Step 2: "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU LIBERAL CRITICS ALREADY COST US THE 2010 ELECTIONS AND WILL COST OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS 2012 SO SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!! Every time you post a diary or comment critical of President Obama you are doing the work of the GOP, and will surely cost Obama and the Dems dearly in 2012 so SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
Do you see what they do there? The two steps are wholly incompatible, yet I see this argument, or some close approximation of it, in almost every diary critical of Obama (which are many, these days), and in response to comments critical of Obama in defender diary.
So which is it defenders? Are liberal critics of Obama a pathetically tiny number of trolls who are insignificant in the Democratic base and whose criticisms are just laughed off, or does this same allegedly puny faction of the liberal movement have the power to destroy Barack Obama with criticisms from the left? Once you pick one of those options, the other by definition becomes inoperative and invalid.
This argument of the defenders really got me to my boiling point in the following diary: After 50 years of working for my party. A defender told a man who said he has worked for Dems in every election since JFK that by criticizing the Democratic Party, he was saying the parties are the same, and was falling for some grand scheme of the Republicans BY criticizing the Democrats and thus hurting Dems, as if the diarist is so dumb he can't figure out this supposed scheme and the commenter was merely beneficently putting him back on the straight and narrow, to a glorious future of criticism-free thought and writing. That shit made my blood boil.
I said it in my response to this commenter, and I will repeat it here: what really is going on is that the ardent defenders see the polling, they see the economy, they see the poor job growth, and now they see that this president will stop at nothing to position himself as a centrist for re-election purposes, up to and including harming core Democratic programs. Seeing this, they are looking for anyone - everyone - to criticize except the president. This is all a set-up - these defenders know that liberal criticism on dailykos or FDL or Huffington Post won't make two shits worth of difference in the 2012 campaign, but knowing the (unfortunately) decent possibility of a fascist victory, they have to have a fall guy, a scapegoat, anything to avoid blaming the actual politician who lost his own race. Guess what liberal critics? You're just who they've been looking for.
Mark my words - as the election draws ever nearer, the attacks on liberal critics will become increasingly unhinged and virulent, and in the election post-mortem, no matter the outcome, liberal critics, not Democratic politicians, will bear the brunt of defender bile.
